Squad Health Check

Overview

Our Squad Health Check tool helps teams self-assess their productivity, performance, and purpose. Developed at Spotify, the check identifies ways to improve processes, skills, and work quality-of-life across eleven team sentiment dimensions. The tool, comprising a Google Sheets™ spreadsheet and editor add-on, automates the generation of a survey for teams to measure “perception” (how the team is doing) and “trend” (where the team is going) in each dimension.

Spotify engineers have refined the check over the years, and we recommend reading their original 2014 blog post and follow-up 2023 blog post prior to using the tool.

Setting up

You will need to sign up for a Google™ account to use the tool if you do not already have an account. You will also need access to Google Drive™ and Google Sheets™; if you are using a work or school account, you may need to ask your administrator to enable access. Once you have an account and access to the required services, you can set up the tool as follows:

1. Copy the Squad Health Check spreadsheet to your own Google Drive™. You may rename your copy as you prefer.

2. Install the Squad Health Check add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace™.

Generate new survey form

1. Run the Editor add-on by opening “Extensions → Squad Health Check → Generate survey form…”. A dialog box will appear asking you to specify a date in yyyy-MM-dd format (such as the date of a meeting at which you plan to discuss the results). Fill in the date and select “OK”.

2. Wait for the add-on to finish running. Once the add-on finishes, you will have a survey form at the root of your drive (“My Drive”) named “Squad Health Check [yyyy-MM-dd]” and a new survey response sheet in your copy of the spreadsheet named “Squad Health Check [yyyy-MM-dd]”.

3. Open the new form, and click the “Publish” button.

Granting OAuth permissions

The first time you generate a survey form, you will see a dialog asking you to grant the following permissions to the plug-in:

• View and manage your forms in Google Drive™: This permission allows the plug-in to create the new form.

• View and manage spreadsheets that this application has been installed in: This permission allows the add-on to update the spreadsheet to collect survey responses.

• Connect to an external service: This permission allows the add-on to pull the icons from the survey template sheet and embed them in the form. The add-on cannot retrieve images from a sheet cell directly but must instead retrieve them using a URL reference pointing to https://*.googleusercontent.com.

Viewing responses

The response sheet will update automatically as team members complete the survey form. You can view the average sentiment scores (higher average numbers are “better”) in the “Compute” sheet, and look at graphs over time of perception and trend in the graph sheets.

Acknowledgments

• Squad Health Check questions and dimension icons from the TeamRetro Spotify process used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license

• Stethoscope icon designed by Freepik from Flaticon

Last modified: 14 October 2025 19:35 EDT